Different Chapter But The Story's The Same
by MarzBarz
Summary: On November 2, 1973, Mary Campbells holds John Winchester and swear she'll never let him go. Exactly 10 years later, Mary Winchester watches that vow burn to ash with her husband.


**Title: ** Different Chapter But The Story's The Same  
**Rating: **PG  
**Words: **2027  
**A/N: **So around Christmas Lise left me a prompt for her present that was basically "Mary lives, not John." And 5 months later, this fic was finally finished. I am legitimately really proud of this fic, and the main reason it took so long to finish is because I was TERRIFIED I would fuck it up somewhere. Thanks to Lise for the beta!

* * *

On November 2, 1973, Mary Campbell holds John Winchester and swears she'll never let him go.

Exactly 10 years later, Mary Winchester watches that vow burn to ash with her husband.

* * *

Dean doesn't talk anymore.

It takes Mary a while to notice; she's too consumed with grief and guilt to notice anything for a while (if she had told him she could have saved him if she left he would still be alive she never should have gotten him into this she killed the love of her life). The last few weeks have been a blur of her going through the motions of taking care of her children without any real conscious thought, not paying any real attention to them.

The first time she notices, really notices, is when she asks Dean what he would like for lunch and he just shrugs. He's focused on his brother, watching as Sammy gurgles happily and chews at a teething ring. Mary asks again with the same result, and suddenly she realizes she doesn't know when she last heard her son's voice.

It's mostly through force of will that she doesn't panic. As much as she wants to try and force her son to talk, she knows it won't help anything in the long run. Instead, she starts listing off different kinds of meat and cheese, watching for Dean to nod, and together they finally settle on grilled cheese and tomato soup.

* * *

There are days when Mary doesn't want to get out of bed. Wants nothing more than to stay where she is, pillow over her face so she can't look at the ceiling ever again.

And then Dean will walk in with a questioning look, asking with his eyes about breakfast. More and more often, Sammy will crawl in, babbling in babytalk, either hot on his brother's heels or with Dean chasing after him. Either way, her sons come in and remind her she still has a reason to go on.

* * *

Sam's first word is "Dean", and his first steps are towards his big brother.

Mary isn't surprised either time.

* * *

Mary tries to keep them in a stable home situation for as long as possible. She doesn't want anything less than she wants her sons to grow up the way she did.

Then, when Sam is eight years old, he asks what really happened to his father.

The night before, Mary had dreamed of fire, and yellow eyes, and her father's voice all twisted and wrong and asking to visit her (house? son?) in ten years. She woke up choking on a scream, and fell asleep wondering just what had happened in that room before she had gotten there.

Mary looks at her youngest, who she already has a feeling is going to grow up to be so like his father, and thinks that she can't lie to herself and her children about this any longer. So she sits them down and tells them everything.

* * *

Mary tries, she tries so hard, to keep their broken family in one place, even as she trains her sons to kill monsters that most people don't know exist. Her promise to herself lasts another 3 years, although she starts taking Dean on easy hunts when he turns 14; only routine salt-and-burns, but hunts nonetheless. They start the typical nomadic lifestyle of a hunter the summer before Dean starts high school, selling the house and moving from hunt to hunt. Dean pushes to upgrade to more difficult hunts when he's 16, and by the time Sam joins them after he turns 14 the difficulty of the hunt doesn't factor into whether or not they take it. Both boys are more skilled than half the hunters she used to know.

There are days when Mary thinks John would be furious that she did this to their children.

Most days she knows he would approve.

* * *

Mary tries hard to keep her head down and not get noticed while her boys are growing up, but she doesn't keep herself entirely out of the game. She keeps an ear to the ground after John dies, gets in touch with a few old contacts and gets back up to speed. She especially pays attention to talk of demons, the things demons are saying. She doesn't like what she hears; there are whispers everywhere of plans, big plans from a yellow-eyed demon with a fondness for young children and ceiling fires.

Mary watches Sam carefully as he grows up. She may have been willfully blind to what Azazel wanted to do when he entered her house with her permission, but she will not let herself be blind to the consequences of her actions. She has heard talk that Azazel wants to groom a Boy King for Hell; she is determined not to let that Boy King be her son.

* * *

Mary manages to form a strange sort of extended family from her old hunting contacts. Bobby Singer becomes something of a surrogate father for Sam and Dean within months of their meeting; Jim Murphy and Rufus Turner both check in with the Winchesters frequently. Mary happens upon Harvelle's Roadhouse while on a weekend hunt and strikes up a friendship with Bill and Ellen, and later with their eccentric regular Ash. When their daughter Joanna Beth is born, Dean and Sam take to her immediately and treat her like the little sister they'll never have.

Dean and Sam quickly worm their ways into the hearts of the hunting community (the part of it that Mary is willing to expose them too, at least) and many school breaks are spent learning tracking with Bobby (Dean's favorite), or ancient languages with Pastor Jim (Sam's favorite).

Then Bill and Mary go on a hunt together, and only Mary comes back. Ellen is heartbroken, and Mary takes her sons and leaves the Harvelle's to their grief. She isn't sure if they'll ever be welcome there again and is trying to work up the courage to go back and apologize, ask if Ellen will let her sons keep one of the best friends they've made, when the grieving woman calls her and says that she would appreciate some space for a few months, but after that the Winchesters had better not be strangers or she'll come after them.

* * *

One of the only things Mary keeps after she starts hunting again is the Impala. It's John's car to the core, and one of the only things she has left of her husband; she can't bear to let it go. The Impala sees her through many hunts, and eventually sees her and her family anywhere they need to go.

Dean loves the car more than anything else. Whenever anything is wrong, he insists on fixing it himself, or helping the mechanics fix it so he knows how for next time. He starts calling the car baby when he's 12. Mary gives it to him when he turns 16, and he tells her later that it's the best birthday present of his life.

* * *

Despite their nomadic lifestyle, Mary has one concrete rule she never breaks; they don't move schools more than once between school breaks. In a perfect world she would have made her boys stay in one place, but this isn't a perfect world, so she settles for moving them around as little as she possibly can during the school year. Sam loves this policy, and flourishes in school; he is consistently taking advanced classes, and gets a 4.0 even when they have to move in the middle of a semester.

Dean tries to convince her to let him drop out at various points in his high school career, but she doesn't allow it. She feels like she could burst with pride when she watches him accept his diploma, Sam clapping and cheering beside her. She gives him a special brand of graduation present by letting him go on his first hunt without her a week later, sending him off to help Caleb with enough money to buy his own gun if he wants to.

* * *

Mary knows Sam is hiding something in the weeks before his graduation. She knows her son, and he's exhibiting all the signs he shows when he desperately wants to hide something. She assumes that it's something about college; Dean is a hunter through and through and never even applied to schools, but Sam is different.

Mary can see so much of the way she used to be in her son; she sees the young girl who wanted out of the hunting life, who met a guy and settled down and had a family, and she wants nothing more than to give that to him. Sam is too compassionate for hunting, and she's seen what killing monsters has done to him over the last 4 years. She won't force her son into a life he doesn't want, even with the rumors about what Azazel did to him in his nursery.

When Sam finally shows her the acceptance packet from Stanford, she doesn't even have to pretend to be proud of him. Her baby has been awarded a full-ride scholarship to one of the most prestigious colleges in the nation, and she has to stop herself from calling all the hunters she knows to brag about him. Dean doesn't like that Sam is leaving and going somewhere that Dean can't watch out for him 24/7, but he grudgingly goes along with it when Mary points out that California is not a monster-free state.

Mary catches Dean bragging about his brother the Stanford student to anyone who will listen the next time they go to the Roadhouse.

* * *

When Sam leaves for Stanford, it becomes a family road trip that somehow extends to include Bobby, Pastor Jim, Caleb, and the Harvelles. Bobby, Pastor Jim, and Caleb all seem to have coincidentally just finished up a hunt in California and Palo Alto is obviously on their way home, while Ellen doesn't even bother pretending and just shows up with Jo to help them move Sam into his dorm room. All the hunters also just so happen to have something with them to help Sam inconspicuously ward his dorm room.

Mary makes everyone take a group picture before Sam's roommate comes in. Standing with an arm around each of her boys, she hopes that somewhere, John is seeing this, and that he's as proud of their sons as she is.

* * *

Life goes on after Sam gets moved in. There are still monsters to hunt; California is probably the safest state in the country, with the amount of times Mary and Dean go out of their way to get hunts near Palo Alto and visit Sam. Sam gives them research help from time to time, in between tests and homework; Mary and Dean make sure to always have hunts in California lined up right before finals week for the first year and a half.

Sam meets Jessica towards the end of their freshman year, and from the first time Sam calls about the girl he just met Mary can tell he's going to ask her out. After a dozen calls for advice and some not-so-subtle pushing from Dean, Sam asks her out, and the pair quickly becomes an almost cliché couple; Dean makes gagging noises every time the pair do something "cute" for the first week. It's a bit of a shock when Jess calls Mary after she and Sam have a fight, but afterwards Mary can do nothing but smile, reminiscing about the good times when John was alive.

* * *

A few days before Sam's interview with Stanford Law School, Mary gets a lead on the demon. She wants to be there to support her son, but everything she's hearing is pointing towards the demon making plans, bad plans, and she has a hunch those plans involve her son. She's not about to let that happen. She leaves a message for Dean, changes phones, and drops off the grid.

The demon that changed her life so many times is not going to be allowed anywhere near her son.


End file.
